Interactive software systems are diverse and valuable tools, providing services that were either never before available, or were previously available only through interaction with a human professional. For example, an interactive software system may provide tax preparation or financial management services. Prior to the advent of interactive software systems, a user would be required to consult with a tax preparation or financial management professional for services and the user would be limited, and potentially inconvenienced, by the hours during which the professional was available for consultation. Furthermore, the user might be required to travel to the professional's physical location. Beyond the inconveniences of scheduling and travel, the user would also be at the mercy of the professional's education, skill, personality, and varying moods. All of these factors resulted in a user experience vulnerable to human error and variations in human ability and temperament.
In contrast, interactive software systems offer many benefits, including, but not limited to: the interactive software system does not have limited working hours, is not geographically limited, and is not subject to human error or variations in human ability or temperament.
Although interactive software systems represent a potentially flexible, highly accessible, and affordable source of services, they do have several significant shortcomings. One significant shortcoming of currently available interactive software systems is that because there is generally no human service representative interaction with the user of the interactive software system, it is difficult to obtain the type of visual and verbal feedback that is associated with human interaction, e.g., with a human tax or financial management specialist. This lack of detailed feedback and real-time interaction can result in less than ideal interactive software system capabilities, support systems, and user experience.
For instance, the features and operation of any interactive software system must be updated and improved to meet the needs of its current users, and to attract new users. However, in order to improve the features and operation of an interactive software system, detailed feedback must be obtained from users regarding specific issues with specific features or operations. Consequently, it is crucial for product development and customer care teams associated with an interactive software system to gather customer feedback on the interactive software system to address any identified shortcomings in the interactive software system as soon as possible, and as accurately as possible. However, currently, interactive software systems, such as tax preparation systems, largely rely on surveys to gather product feedback. Unfortunately, survey-based product feedback has several drawbacks that limit its effectiveness including, but not limited to: insufficient detail regarding the issue encountered, why it is an issue, and what the user would like to see done; lack of focus and general comments that provide no connection between the feedback/comments and specific operations and/or features of the interactive software system; generally subjective and emotion driven feedback that does not provide enough detail regarding why the user dislikes a given feature or operation and what emotion the feature or operation provokes in the user; and the notoriously low user participation in the survey process due to its generally burdensome requirement to enter data after the interview and interaction with the interactive software system is complete.
Another shortcoming of currently available interactive software systems is the placement and utilization of customer support and intervention systems associated with traditional interactive software systems. These services are currently provided in a highly generic way with the support and/or intervention services being offered automatically, if at all, at points within the interactive software system where support is predicted to be desired based on a generic hypothetical user. However, given that almost no individual user of the interactive software system is likely to exactly match the generic hypothetical user, the result is that the types of customer support and intervention systems offered, and when they are offered, may not correspond to where, or why, an actual individual user is getting frustrated or confused. As a result, support and/or intervention services are often offered at irrelevant times and locations for any given user.
In addition, because they lack sufficient “real-time” feedback, and unlike human professionals providing services, traditional interactive software systems cannot detect, much less adjust to, a user's emotional state or tailor their interactions with a user depending upon the user's emotional state. Consequently, even though a user may be in a certain emotional state when using the interactive software system or may have certain responses to the interactive software system that change his or her emotional state, traditional interactive software systems are developed in a way that specifically attempts to provide the most useful service to as many of their users as possible, i.e., in a static “one size fits all” approach. Indeed, traditional interactive software systems are, by design, fairly generic in nature and often lack the malleability to meet the specific needs of a given user, much less respond to variations in the emotional state of a given user. As a result, an interactive software system designed for a generic hypothetical user may alienate a specific user, who generally has a temperament that differs from the temperament of the generic hypothetical user and whose emotional state may vary from interaction to interaction.
The inability of traditional interactive software systems to meet the needs of specific users and/or adjust to a user's emotional state often results in user frustration, and ultimately, in lost customers. This is because, predictably, when users feel alienated from, or become frustrated with, an interactive software system, they are far more likely to abandon the interactive software system, which results in lost business.
Because traditional interactive software systems provide a static and generic user experience, they are incapable of adapting the user experience to the user's emotional state. As a result, the user experience and any analysis associated with the user experience is a largely inflexible component of a given version of an interactive software system.
In short, due to a lack of detailed and reliable feedback from users, numerous operations and features of traditional interactive software systems are designed based on generic user models that are, in fact, and by design, not accurately representative of any given “real world” user. It is therefore not surprising that many users, if not all users, of traditional interactive software systems find the experience, at best, impersonal. Specifically, users of traditional tax preparation interactive software systems may find the interview experience unnecessarily frustrating and unpleasant. Clearly, this is not the type of impression that results in happy, loyal, repeat customers.
Even worse, in many cases, the inability of traditional interactive software systems to detect, model, and/or react to a user's emotional state causes users to become frustrated with their user experience, the software system, and the provider of the software system. Many of these users and customers then simply abandon the process and interactive software system completely and may, therefore, never become paying or repeat customers. Furthermore, given the speed and reach of modern communications, any complaints voiced by a dissatisfied user may reach a myriad of other, potential users. Indeed, due to modern communications systems, the number of people that can become the audience for a single complaint is overwhelming and the potential reach of complaints can create serious consequences.
Consequently, lack of detailed, objective, connected, and reliable feedback from users, and resulting inaccurate user modeling, is a long standing technical problem in the interactive software system field. What is needed is a technical solution that provides for obtaining more detailed, connected, and reliable feedback data from users of an interactive software system that has a more empirical and objective basis. Then this feedback data could be used to create predictive models that allow for targeted product diagnosis, targeted interventions, targeted marketing/upsell attempts, and grouping and analysis of feedback and user categories and feedback sources.